New Prairie Construction, Urbana IL

New Prairie Construction is a 25-employee general contractor in Urbana, Illinois, with a special focus on historic restoration and green building. The two owners of the 30-year old company transitioned to a worker cooperative in order to pursue retirement and legacy goals, seeing a cooperative as the best path for the company to retain employees and its values in the long term. One owner will stay on as a member of the cooperative, and sees shared ownership model as continuation of the smart and inventive solutions employees demonstrate in their everyday work.

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Becoming Employee Owned is an initiative of the Democracy at Work Institute.

Our mission is to expand the worker cooperative model to reach communities most directly affected by social and economic inequality, specifically people of color, recent immigrants, and low-­wage workforces. We are a movement-based think-and-do tank supporting worker cooperatives to grow to a scale that creates meaningful change in the economy.